usted, he could run
no farther, and came to a halt about six hundred feet from the awful
spot. Then an idea came into his head, literally like a ray of light.
Pulling off his cap, he took out of it a cotton scarf, drew his knife
out of the upper part of his boot, and crossed himself, muttering,
"God bless me!"

He buried the knife in his left arm above the elbow; the blood spurted
out, flowing in a hot stream. In this he soaked his scarf, smoothed it
out, tied it to the stick and hung out his red flag.

He stood waving his flag. The train was already in sight. The driver
would not see him--would come close up, and a heavy train cannot be
pulled up in six hundred feet.

And the blood kept on flowing. Semyon pressed the sides of the wound
together so as to close it, but the blood did not diminish. Evidently
he had cut his arm very deep. His head commenced to swim, black spots
began to dance before his eyes, and then it became dark. There was a
ringing in his ears. He could not see the train or hear the noise.
Only one thought possessed him. "I shall not be able to keep standing
up. I shall fall and drop the flag; the train will pass over me. Help
me, oh Lord!"

All turned black before him, his mind became a blank, and he dropped
the flag; but the blood-stained banner did not fall to the ground. A
hand seized it and held it high to meet the approaching train. The
engineer saw it, shut the regulator, and reversed steam. The train
came to a standstill.

People jumped out of the carriages and collected in a crowd. They saw
a man lying senseless on the footway, drenched in blood, and another
man standing beside him with a blood-stained rag on a stick.

Vasily looked around at all. Then, lowering his head, he said: "Bind
me. I tore up a rail!"

THE DARLING

BY ANTON P. CHEKOV

Olenka, the daughter of the retired collegiate assessor Plemyanikov,
was sitting on the back-door steps of her house doing nothing. It was
hot, the flies were nagging and teasing, and it was pleasant to think
that it would soon be evening. Dark rain clouds were gathering from
the east, wafting a breath of moisture every now and then.

Kukin, who roomed in the wing of the same house, was standing in the
yard looking up at the sky. He was the manager of the Tivoli, an
open-air theatre.

"Again," he said despairingly. "Rain again. Rain, rain, rain! Every
day rain! As though to spite me. I might as well stick my head into a
noose a